Hi, Brian Lairer here.

Up next, Brian Lairor Weekend,

three of our favorite segments from the week,

packaged together for you to listen to on the weekend.

So enjoy, and I'll see you back on the radio Monday at 10 a.m.

on WNYC and WNYC. Good morning, everyone.

We begin today with today's installment of our

election series, 30 issues and 30 days. It's day 12 and issue 12. How would the New York City mayoral

candidates try to improve the public schools? This is a vast topic with more moving parts than we can do

justice to in one segment, right? And that

affects more than 900,000 kids in their families, tens of thousands of teachers, plus other

staffers, and is by far, in case you didn't know this, the biggest item in the city budget,

by far, more than a third of the New York City budget every year goes to the schools.

That's way more, for example, than the police and fire and sanitation departments combined.

So we can't do it justice in one breath. What we will do is break it up for today into three

education questions and come back to education again later in the series. For today,

we will ask, should the mayor give up mayoral control of schools? Mumdani is proposing to actually

reduce his own power over the school system if elected. Should there be more charter schools

and other kinds of options? Cuomo and Sliwa are both

proposing versions of that, and should gifted and talented programs be expanded, contracted,

or remain the same from kindergarten, all the way up through the specialized high schools,

Brunscience, Stuyvesant, the others, candidates disagree on that.

...